directed by Travis Knight
written by Christina Hodge
In the interest of disclosure, allow me to share my history with the Transformers film franchise. I watched the original animated movie released in 1986 a grand total of 26 times on home video. I was 11. I cried when Optimus Prime died. At the ripe old age of 32 years old, I watched, and detested the first Michael-Bay-directed Transformers movie that came out in 2007, so much so that I refused to watch the second, third, and fifth one in theaters. I only watched the fourth one because there was literally nothing else showing at the mall that day, and after a long day's work I was honestly quite desperate to watch a movie. I didn't bother to review it, though.
To me, the cardinal sin of every Transformers movie that came out between the 1986 film and the new prequel Bumblebee isn't even the fact that they are the exemplification of style over substance, or the fact that they pander to director Michael Bay's addiction to explosions and his determination to objectify the women in his movie, whether they are the love interest of the lead or the lead character's actual daughter.
No, what turned me off to those movies to the extent that, after the first movie, I only ever watched another one because the alternative was walking around a mall, waiting for my colleagues for two hours, was that none of these movies was made with anything even remotely resembling heart.
I have no illusions that the 1986 animated Transformers movie anything more than an extended commercial for a new line of toys, but even then, it had an emotional core. It was a coming of age story for its lead character, Hot Rod, who underwent a journey from callow youth to Autobot leader. It had stakes, it had emotional highs and lows, and one heck of a soundtrack. The Bay movies had none of that.
Bumblebee, from virtually the word "go" lets the viewers know it has more in common with that cult-favorite 80s animated movie than any of the live-action Bay films. The movie starts on Cybertron, and us fans of the Generation 1 Transformers designs are treated to a smorgasbord of characters from that era, from Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), to Soundwave and Shockwave (Jon Bailey), to Ravage, with Bumblebee, or, as he is known at that point B-127 (briefly voiced by Dylan O' Brien) as the war between the Decepticons and the Autobot rebels rages, with the Autobots having to flee Cybertron. B-127 is dispatched to earth, where, upon crash landing, he almost immediately figures in an unfortunate encounter with not only American soldiers led by Major Burns (Jon Cena) but a Decepticon too. In the ensuing battle, B-127 literally loses his voice as the mechanism that controls it is destroyed.
Not too long thereafter, we find Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld), a young girl going through tough times; even though she's just turned 18, she's down on her luck and still recovering from the death of her father. She's annoyed that her mother (Pamela Adlon) seems to have moved on so easily from her husband's death, having moved on to a new boyfriend, Ron (Stephen Schneider), and is even more annoyed with her kid brother Otis (Jason Drucker) whom she finds self-absorbed. She doesn't even care about being snickered at by the local mean girls, and is completely oblivious to Memo (Jorge Lendeborg, Jr.), her co-worker at the carnival with a massive crush on her. All she wants is to escape her life, and so she after her job at the carnival selling corn dogs and lemonade she tinkers with her father's broken old Corvette. She rummages around in the local junkyard looking for parts, when she stumbles on a beat-up old Volkswagen Beetle that catches her eye. After haggling with the junkyard owner she takes the Beetle home, only to discover that it's actually B-127 in disguise. Thus begins an interesting, if somewhat hair-raising friendship, especially when B-127's radio signals attract Decepticons Shatter (Angela Bassett) and Dropkick (Justin Theroux) to earth to find the hidden Autobot. Even as B-127 strikes up a friendship with Charlie, who dubs him Bumblebee based on his buzzing "speech," little does he realize that his mortal enemies are coming for him, and plan to use him to wipe out the Autobots once and for all.
Like its predecessors, this movie is an action movie first and foremost, but unlike the Michael Bay movies, there is so much more to this little confection than just clanging metal and wanton explosions. Travis Knight, whose only other film is the beautiful, hauntingly tragic animated film Kubo and the Two Strings, infuses this 80s set prequel with dollops of charm, helped along by a charismatic lead and a catchy 80s soundtrack. The script, while it hews to a number of outsider/teen movie cliches, is wonderfully lively, genuinely funny, and actually manages to go the entire running time without a single crude joke. Whereas the writers of the last "Transformers" movie I watched apparently put more thought into a single line exempting someone from statutory rape than they did the entire script, writer Christina Hodge went through the trouble of crafting a likable teenage girl whose angst made her easy to relate to. Like Hogarth, the protagonist of Brad Bird's little-seen but much loved 1999 film The Iron Giant, of which this is a spiritual remake, Steinfeld's Charlie is without a father, and we really feel his absence too. It makes her friendship with Bumblebee that much richer than the boy-and-pet relationship Shia LeBeouf's Sam Witwicky had with Bumblebee in the first couple of films and adds a surprising amount of heft to an otherwise buoyant outing.
Another thing that sets this film apart from the others in the series is likable human characters. Hailee Steinfeld, whom I've always liked, ever since I first saw her in her Academy-Award-nominated turn as Mattie Ross in True Grit, just shines as Charlie, making her thoroughly sympathetic and imbuing her with a genuine pathos that transcends much of the prosaic teenage angst we're used to seeing in movies about young people. Lendeborg is genuinely likable as Charlie's smitten co-worker, and while John Cena and the rest of the government types in the movie aren't much more than the usual friendly-alien movie cliches, complete with a last-act change of heart, they're still a lot more watchable than John Turturro's cringeworthy Agent Simmons from the original series (who, incidentally, makes an appearance here, albeit played by a much younger actor) or any of the other cardboard cutouts from the other movies.
As a result of having characters worth caring about, including the speechless but extraordinarily animated Bumblebee, the movie manages to imbue its action scenes with actual stakes. It helps that they are far better staged than the ones in the Bay films, which usually looked like two junk piles smashing together.
It's not all good news, though; as much as I like Angela Bassett, the bad guys she and Justin Theroux give voice to are about as generic as it gets, and it's kind of disappointing that a movie with so many generation 1 characters didn't manage to throw in a couple of well-known Generation 1 villains as well.
Overall, though, this was the sort of Transformers movie I was hoping to see when the first one came out almost twelve years ago, and given that Optimus Prime shows up in the end, we may get even more like it sometime soon.
8/10
